Because That's The Way Things Work

At the beginning of this summer, we started a vegetable garden on our balcony. If it had been our main source of food, we'd have starved by now, unless two people can live on one tomato or pepper every week or so.

So on Sunday, as the previous post indicates, we joined a CSA, bringing bountiful amounts of fresh vegetables and fruit into our home.

Word apparently reached the balcony garden. Who says plants don't communicate?

This morning, I picked five tomatoes. The pepper plant is undergoing a growth spurt, and will likely produce a bumper crop in a week or so. And the eggplant, which till now has done nothing but sit there and soak up water has now produced two incipient fruit, see above.

Now if only the zucchini would get the message.

Support Agriculture In Your Community

Over the last 20 years, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) has become a popular way for consumers to buy local, seasonal food directly from a farmer. Here are the basics: a farmer offers a certain number of "shares" to the public. Typically the share consists of a box of vegetables, but other farm products may be included. Interested consumers purchase a share (aka a "membership" or a "subscription") and in return receive a box (bag, basket) of seasonal produce each week throughout the farming season.
That's all there is to it.
At the Eagle Rock Plaza's Sunday morning farmer's market a box of CSA produce costs $15.00 and is filled with melons and okra and squash and greens and herbs and cucumbers -- more than enough produce for two people.
Our particular CSA is the South Central Farmers' Cooperative based out of, you guessed it, South Central Los Angeles. The South Central Farmers' CSA program started on a 14 acre piece of property on Alameda at 41 Street and now links locally grown produce to all members of Los Angeles, regardless of race, ethnicity, background, and economic status. By the way, those original 14 acres were bulldozed in 2006 to doubtless make room for yet another empty lot in South Central Los Angeles.
Local farmers need our support and we need organically grown produce. It's that simple. Check it out. Find a farmers' market near you and then locate the CSA booth.
You'll be doing yourself and the planet a favor.

Amarone and Murder

Some people might say than an Amarone is a wine to kill for so imagine my surprise when the wine showed up in Tess Gerritsen's most recent murder mystery, The Keepsake. But there it was almost at the end of the book. Regular Gerritsen character Maura Isles thinks of her uneaten grilled cheese sandwich left at home and the glass of wine now offered her. "It was a rich Amarone, so dark it appeared almost black in the parlor's firelight." I kind of had the book's ending figured out so there were no surprises there but imagine my surprise at the mention of this wine. I'm thinking that since Tess Gerritsen is a physician turned writer most of the medical stuff in her books is fairly right on. So is her description of and I'm assuming appreciation of Amarone.
The wine itself is a fluke. It was originally supposed to be a sweet wine called Recioto but the guy in charge forgot about it and allowed the grapes to continue fermenting until it lost all of its sweetness. Not wanting to toss the whole thing out, the new brew was named Amarone which apparently acutually means big bitter. In the scheme of wine things, Amarone is fairly new. Despite its new comer status, it's already made its mark in popular culture.
In the book Silence of the Lambs, Hanibal Lecter eats the census taker's liver with fava beans and Amarone. I know, in the movie he enjoyed a Chianti. Go figure.
If she had only mentioned the wine earlier in the book I might have poured myself a glass of Two Buck Chuck Red and pretended. The real stuff is pretty expensive.
It's still a good wine. And the book was good, too.

Gentle Evenings and Happy Days

At the very last minute we acquired two free tickets to tonight's Dodger game. A couple of days ago we probably would not have gone to the game. The air was too full of smoke and the nerves too tense from fire concerns to even breathe deeply let alone enjoy a game. Today the smoke lifted a bit and despite its ominous origins, the Station fire seemed at least half way contained. So off to the game went we.
Earlier in the season a good friend showed me her secret and free baseball game parking place the location of which I won't reveal because then, well, you know...it wouldn't be a secret any more.
Since this was all very last minute we were running late and even in the secret parking place couldn't get as close to the stadium as I would have liked. Free, though, is free and we gladly walked the extra distance.
At about the seventh inning stretch I smelled smoke and assumed the wind from the Station fire had shifted in our direction. I also assumed that the helicopter flying over head was checking out the game. And that haze around the outfield lights had to be, well, night time fog surely drifting on to the field.
Imagine my surprise, then, after having ignored all of these clues, to find that the street -- my friend's secret parking place and now my secret parking place too -- was closed because of a brush fire right about where we would have parked had we arrived earlier.
Things seemed to be out and under control when we walked by several fire trucks. The fire fighters were already coiling their heavy hoses. Even so, I wanted to applaud them. I didn't, though. After all, the street was closed and the game was ending. I still had time to make a U turn and be on my way before the street opened to post game traffic.
Driving home listening to the news to see if we could hear anything about the Chavez Ravine brush fire we learned of a small earthquake up around Bakersfield.
Apparently no one was injured in the earthquake, the little brush fire appeared to be out, the big brush fire appeared to be under control, the Dodgers won, and on the still waters of the New Jersey shore a full moon promised bright futures.
Life is good.

How About Some Good News For A Change?

In this morning's Los Angeles Times, on page 22, there was an article entitled: "Israelis and Palestinians talking again after months-long freeze". The article went on to say that Israeli and Palestinian officials held their first high-level meeting in months on Wednesday and discussed ways to bolster a promising economic recovery in the West Bank.

That's news, and it's good news. Why bury it on the last page of the "world" section?

Now, you know that if a Palestinian suicide bomber had blown up a bus in Israel, or if the Israeli army had killed a Palestinian family, that would have been on the front page. With color pictures.

I know that there is plenty of evil in the world, and that it has to be reported. But after days and days of looking at pictures of fire, hurricane Jimena, and the ugly creep who abducted Jaycee Lee Dugard, it would have been nice to see something hopeful on the front page of the paper.

Be ATM Wise

If you use a bank ATM, be on the alert. For safety sake, the authorities will soon be installing a $25.00 computer software program at all of their ATM's to protect the public from ATM robberies. If you are held at gun point to take money from your bank account through the ATM, you can alert the authorities/police of your situation by inserting your secret code number backwards at the machine. Learn your code number forward and backward so there's no hesitation on your part that would warn the robber of your notification to the police. Be safe!

The Tao on Disaster

What with the fires and hurricanes, I came across a reading in 365 Tao Daily Meditations by Deng Ming-Dao that may be helpful:

Mute black night,
Sudden fire.
Destruction.

Disaster strikes in its own time. It is so overwhelming that we can do nothing other than accept it. It alters the course of our days, our work, our very thinking. Although it is tempting to resent disaster, there is not much use in doing so. We cannot say that a disaster had malice toward us, though it might have been deadly, and it's hard to say that it has "wrecked" our plans: In one stroke it changes the very basis of the day.

Disaster is natural. It is not the curse of the gods, it is not punishment. Disaster results from the interplay of forces: the earthquake from pressures in the earth, the hurricane from wind and rain, even the accidental fire from a spark. We rush to ask "Why?" in the wake of a great disaster, but we should not let superstition interfere with dispassionate acceptance. There is no god visiting down destruction.

Disasters may well change us deeply, but they will pass. We must keep to our deeper convictions and remember our goals. Whether we remain ash or become the phoenix is up to us.